FLPC Director Emily Broad Leib, along with Vermont Law Professor Laurie Beyranevand, Make the Case for a National Strategy in Georgetown’s Food & Drug Law Journal

In the most recent issue of Georgetown’s Food and Drug Law Journal, HFLPC’s Director Emily Broad Leib and Laurie Beyranevand, the Senior Faculty Fellow for Food Law and Policy at the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems (CAFS) at Vermont Law School, lay out their arguments for a comprehensive, national food strategy. Food encompasses such a wide spectrum of issues—touching public and environmental health, immigration and labor, trade, and safety, among others—and is regulated by dozens of government agencies and a web of laws and regulations. This complexity requires a more efficient and effective approach than the status quo in order to improve our food system outcomes related to the environment, health, safety, and access.

The Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic and Center for Agriculture and Food Systems at Vermont Law School have been working together to draft a Blueprint for a National Food Policy Strategy, and released a report with that very title in March of 2017. In it, they make the case that we can and should commit to a national food strategy that addresses and prioritizes food-related issues, and which sets goals that take into account food’s unique cross-section of interests and challenges.

The FDLJ article follows up on the report with an analysis about how such a strategy would tackle some of the hot-button issues at the heart of the most recent presidential campaign, such as reducing regulatory inefficiency, promoting economic development, and incorporating stakeholders’ perspectives—especially those from rural communities—who feel that policymakers in Washington are out of touch with their challenges. The ideal national strategy, they write, should be transparent, accountable, durable, and resilient. The authors argue that the strategy should be created or endorsed by the US government, but concede that if this administration won't create one, a People's Food Strategy, similar to the one created in Canada, would be a welcome start. However, they argue that ultimately such a strategy will need government buy-in or endorsement in order to be successful.